Mitt Romney Cares Deeply About The Very Poor

Really. I’m quite surprised to see that Mark has gone so soft on the Mittster, saying that Romney inadvertently stated what he really believes. Mitt, like all Republicans nowadays, cares about the very poor very much. This is primarily for three reasons:

1) He needs the very poor to serve as the scapegoat for the Republican war on the middle class. “You” are getting screwed by Washington because it is giving “them” all your money. Who do you think “they” are?

2) Although Republicans have no serious plan to cut government spending, they always need to find something to cut, and that something is pretty much always programs for the very poor. Mark is right that Medicaid mostly serves people in nursing homes, but about one-third of it IIRC is for medical care for the poor. Guess where the cuts are going to come from. As a general budgetary matter, this won’t do much, but it will give Republican Congressmen something to celebrate.

3) And finally, Republicans need the very poor to serve as a lumpenproletariat to keep wages down. You don’t like working at minimum wage? There’s someone else who would. Now, that’s not completely true, because the GOP nowadays uses illegal immigrants for that, and then uses them to stir up anti-immigrant racism and cultural anxiety. But hey, that’s just multitasking.

You don’t like working at minimum wage? There’s someone else who would. Now, that’s not completely true…

Not completely true because:

Suppose a local girl scout troop hired a sign twirler to twirl their message on a busy corner. They have to pay the twirler minimum wage.
Obviously if big damn government wasn’t forcing that scale on them the troop could pay 4 sign twirlers 1/4 minimum wages and totally own the intersection.

It’s simple math. Even girl scouts hawking corporate cookies for chump change can understand that…
Big damn government is the problem. Big damn government is why we have high unemployment.

Big government isn’t the impediment; it’s the lack of “thinking outside the box” by those Girl Scouts.

Waitresses don’t fall under miminmum wage restrictions, do they? The minimum wage for waitresses is $2.13, which is pretty darned close to your hypothetical of $1.87 for those four corner-twirlers. Just unwrap the cookies, put them on paper plates, and let the twirlers “serve” them to the customers.

Another thing the Girl Scouts could do is sell the cookies to the twirlers, and let the twirlers, as independent sub-contractors, resell them to the customers.

It ain’t big government forcing high unemployment, it’s inability of big business to think outside the box.